Thursday, March 1, 2012

Py3k status update #2

Since my previous status update, things have improved a lot: first of all, I fixed the syntax of many more tests, which were failing on the branch because they used constructs which are no longer valid in Python 3, such as u'' strings, the print statement or the old except Exception, e syntax. I have to say that this work is tedious and not very rewarding, but it has to be done anyway, so that the real failures can stand up.

Then, I spent most of the rest of the time by killing features which are present in Python 2 and are gone in Python 3.

Some of them were easy and mechnical: for example, I removed all the function attributes such as func_code and func_closure, which has been renamed to __code__ and __closure__, and then I had to find and fix all the places which still expected the old ones.

Some were trickier: I removed support for the cmp function and the __cmp__ special method, but this also meant that I had to fix a few types which relied on it to be comparable (for example, did you know that the cells contained in __closure__ are comparable?). At the same time, I also removed the old behavior which in Python 2 allows us to compare arbitrary objects with <, > & co.: in Python 3 the only comparisons allowed between incompatible types are == and !=.

Speaking of old special methods, __hex__ and __oct__ are gone as well (and I didn't even know about their existence before removing them :-))

But the most important breakthrough was the removal of the _file module, containing the implementation of the file type in Python 2, which is now gone since in Python 3 files are handled by the _io module. Killing the module was not straightforward, because some of the importing logic was tightly tied to the internal implementation of files, so it needed some refactoring. Finally, I had to fix the marshal module to correctly detect text files vs. byte files.

Among these things, I fixed tons of smaller issues here and there. As a result, there are many fewer failing tests than a few weeks ago. Obviously the number itself does not mean much, because sometimes fixing a single test takes hours, and some other times by changing one line one fixes tens of tests. But at the end, seeing it dropping from 999 to 650 always is nice and rewarding :-).

The road for having a pypy3k is still long, but everything is going fine so far. Stay tuned for more updates!

Since my previous status update, things have improved a lot: first of all, I fixed the syntax of many more tests, which were failing on the branch because they used constructs which are no longer valid in Python 3, such as u'' strings, the print statement or the old except Exception, e syntax. I have to say that this work is tedious and not very rewarding, but it has to be done anyway, so that the real failures can stand up.

Then, I spent most of the rest of the time by killing features which are present in Python 2 and are gone in Python 3.

Some of them were easy and mechnical: for example, I removed all the function attributes such as func_code and func_closure, which has been renamed to __code__ and __closure__, and then I had to find and fix all the places which still expected the old ones.

Some were trickier: I removed support for the cmp function and the __cmp__ special method, but this also meant that I had to fix a few types which relied on it to be comparable (for example, did you know that the cells contained in __closure__ are comparable?). At the same time, I also removed the old behavior which in Python 2 allows us to compare arbitrary objects with <, > & co.: in Python 3 the only comparisons allowed between incompatible types are == and !=.

Speaking of old special methods, __hex__ and __oct__ are gone as well (and I didn't even know about their existence before removing them :-))

But the most important breakthrough was the removal of the _file module, containing the implementation of the file type in Python 2, which is now gone since in Python 3 files are handled by the _io module. Killing the module was not straightforward, because some of the importing logic was tightly tied to the internal implementation of files, so it needed some refactoring. Finally, I had to fix the marshal module to correctly detect text files vs. byte files.

Among these things, I fixed tons of smaller issues here and there. As a result, there are many fewer failing tests than a few weeks ago. Obviously the number itself does not mean much, because sometimes fixing a single test takes hours, and some other times by changing one line one fixes tens of tests. But at the end, seeing it dropping from 999 to 650 always is nice and rewarding :-).

The road for having a pypy3k is still long, but everything is going fine so far. Stay tuned for more updates!

For importing support, you may want to look at the current state of the 3.3 importlib implementation. Brett's on the verge of hooking that up as CPython's native import system - it should be possible for PyPy3k to use it as well.

@Larry: yes, I've considered that, but as Nick says we are targeting 3.2, so it's much easier to just kill it in the meantime. Adding it back will be very easy.

@Nick: yes, using importlib is something which I also have considered. However, I'd prefer not to diverge too much from the "default" branch (because we are going to regularly merge default into py3k for a long time). I suppose that as long as the current importing logic works fine, we'll keep it :-)